[Illustration]
I'm new, said she, I don't think you'll find my card here. You're new; how
interesting. Can you read the letters on that chart? Open your mouth.
Breathe. Do you have headaches? No. Ah, yes, you are new. I'm new, said
the oval moon at the bottom of the mist funnel, brightening and paling.
I don't think you'll find my card there. Open your mouth--Breathe--A
crater big enough to hold the land from New York to Philadelphia. New!
I'm new, said the quartz crystal on the parlor table--like glass--Mr.
Tiffany bought a cart load of them. Like water or white rock candy--I'm
new, said the mist rising from the duck pond, rising, curling, turning
under the moon--Unknown grasses asleep in the level mists, pieces of the
fog. Last night it was an ocean. Tonight trees. Already it is yesterday.
Turned into the wrong street seeking to pass the power house from which
the hum, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm--sprang. Electricity has been discovered for
ever. I'm new, says the great dynamo. I am progress. I make a word.
Listen! UMMMMMMMMMMMM--
Ummmmmmmmmm--Turned into the wrong street at three A.M. lost in the fog,
listening, searching--Waaaa! said the baby. I'm new. A boy! A what? Boy.
Shit, said the father of two other sons. Listen here. This is no place
to talk that way. What a word to use. I'm new, said the sudden word.
The fog lay in deep masses on the roads at three A.M. Into the wrong
street turned the car seeking the high pitched singing tone of the
dynamos endlessly spinning in the high banquet hall, filling the house
and the room where the bed of pain stood with progress. Ow, ow! Oh help
me somebody! said she. UMMMMMM sang the dynamo in the next street,
UMMMM. With a terrible scream she drowned out its sound. He went to the
window to see if his car was still there, pulled the curtain aside,
green--Yes it was still there under the light where it would not be so
likely to be struck by other cars coming in the fog. There it was as
still as if it were asleep. Still as could be. Not a wheel moved. No
sound came from the engine. It stood there under the purple arc-light,
partly hidden by a pole which cast a shadow toward him in the masses of
floating vapor. He could see the redtail-light still burning brightly
with the electricity that came from the battery under the floor boards.
No one had stolen the spare tire. It was very late.--Well, said he,
dropping the shade and thinking that maybe when he was busy someone
might easily come up from the meadows and take the spare tire--Well, I
suppose I had better see how things have progressed.
And so he backed out into the main street and turned up another block.
And there he saw. The great doors were open to full view of the world. A
great amphitheatre of mist lighted from the interior of the power house.
In rows sat the great black machines saying vrummmmmmmmmmmmm. Stately in
the great hall they sat and generated electricity to light the cellar
stairs with. To warm the pad on Mrs. Voorman's belly. To cook supper by
and iron Abie's pyjamas. Here was democracy. Here is progress--here is
the substance of words--UMMMMM: that is to say meat or linen or belly
ache.--Three A.M. To be exact twenty-eight minutes past three.
And all this was yesterday--Yesterday and there at her window I saw her,
the lady of my dreams her long and sallow face, held heavily near the
glass, overlooking the street where the decayed-meat wagon passes and
the ice-cream cart rumbles with its great power and the complicated
affairs of the town twitter toward the open sewer in the meadows by the
Button Factory. Orange peel, tomato peel floating in a whitish, soapy
flow--Her face without expression, the lady I am dying for, her right
shoulder as high as her ear, the line of the shoulder sloping down
acutely to the neck, her left shoulder also raised so that her head
seemed to lie loose in a kind of saddle.
Supreme in stupidity and a fog of waste, profit in what is left. Oh what
delectable morsel is left. Blessed hunchback, scum of loves weekly
praying in all churches--which by the way take up the very best sites in
the town. There she sat, her body low down below the window frame, only
her face showing, and looked at me dully, looked because I looked--and
my heart leaped up to her in passionate appeal that she should be my
queen and run with me over the foggy land--Forward--Onward and upward
forever.
So saying the day had progressed toward the afternoon and under the
poplars the dried leaves had begun to collect. It had been unbearably
hot. September is a hot month. The leaves had fallen one by one. No
wind. One by one pushed off by the buds which swollen by the heat had
thought that winter was over. Off with you. You stand in the way of
progress, say the young leaves. Sitting on his chair he seemed like any
other man but to get to the bed he suddenly descended to the floor. On
his long arms--he Apollo, and using the stumps of his legs, apelike on
all fours and talking quietly he swung himself up over the edge of the
bed and lay down.
Over the field--for the fog had left the grasses in the early morning
when the sun came up with majestic progression, haughtily leaving the
dropping city under him--over the field--for it was late in the
afternoon and the sunlight shone in with his poor broken legs, crippled
as he was--the sun shone in from the west. The car had turned in to the
wrong street and he had gone into the store where the paralysed
Scotchman whom he had never seen before put him on the way--climbing
into his bed sent his rays almost level over a patch of red grass hot
and blinding. Over the field the heat rose and in it even from a
distance due to the blur of light on their wings a great swarm of gnats
could be seen turning, twisting in the air, rising falling--over the
grass, fringed with the progressing sun.
But with great sweeps and sudden turns a dozen dragon flies seeming
twice as large as they really were, from the sun blurring their
transparent wings, darted back and forth over the field catching and
eating the gnats. Swiftly the gnats progressed into the dragon flies,
swiftly coalescing--and from time to time a droplet of stuff fell from
the vent of a feeding dragon fly,--and the little sound of this stuff
striking the earth could not be heard with its true poetic force. Lost.
Lost in a complicated world. Except in the eyes of God. But a word, a
word rang true. Shit, said the father. With this name I thee christen:
he added under his breath.
And yet--one must begin somewhere.
Deeply religious, he walked into the back yard and watching lest the
children see him and want what they shouldn't have he approached the
grape vines. Selecting a bunch of Delawares he picked it with some
difficulty spilling a few of the fruit. Then he walked to the other side
and found some blue ones. These too he ate. Then some white which he ate
also one by one swallowing the pulp and the seeds and spitting out the
skins. He continued to eat but no word came to satisfy.
Somehow a word must be found. He felt rather a weight in his belly from
eating so many grapes. He, himself that must die someday, he the deeply
religious friend of great men and women in incipience, he couldn't find
a word. Only words and words. He ate another bunch of the grapes. More
words. And never THE word.
A novel must progress toward a word. Any word that--Any word. There is
an idea.
His brother was ill. He must go home. The sun will soon be on the
Pacific coast. To bed, to bed--take off the clothes beginning on the
outside and working in. How would it be to take off the underwear first,
then the shirt--
Progress is dam foolishness.--It is a game. Either I have or--a thieves'
game. Hold me close, closer, close as you can. I can't hold you any
closer. I have been stealing. I should never touch anything. I should
never think of anything but you. I love another. It is a word. I have
left you alone to run wild with a girl. I would be tame. Lies flicker in
the sun. Visions beset noonday. Through the back window of the
shoe-shine parlor a mass of golden glow flashes in the heat. Come into
my heart while I am running--jumping from airplane to plane in mid-air.
I cannot stop: the word I am seeking is in your mouth--I cannot stop.
Hold me against--
You are wrong, wrong Alva N. Turner. It is deeper than you imagine. I
perceive that it may be permissible for a poet to write about a poetic
sweet-heart but never about a wife--should have said possible. It is not
possible. All men do the same. Dante be damned. Knew nothing at all.
Lied to himself all his life. Profited by his luck and never said
thanks. God pulled the lady up by the roots. Never even said thank you.
Quite wrong. Look what he produced. Page after page. Helped the world to
bread. Have another slice of bread Mr. Helseth. No thank you--Not hungry
tonight? Something on his mind.
The word. Who.
Liberate the words. You tie them. Poetic sweet-heart. Ugh. Poetic
sweet-heart. My dear Miss Word let me hold your W. I love you. Of all
the girls in school you alone are the one--
Dramatise myself make it sing together as if the world were a bird who
married to the same mate five years understood in the end transmigration
of souls.
Nonsense. I am a writer and will never be anything else. In which case
it is impossible to find the word. But to have a novel one must progress
with the words. The words must become real, they must take the place of
wife and sweet-heart. They must be church--Wife. It must be your wife.
It must be a thing of adamant with the texture of wind. Wife.
Am I a word? Words, words, words--
And approaching the end of the novel in his mind as he sat there with
his wife sleeping alone in the next room he could feel that something
unusual had happened. Something had grown up in his life dearer
than--It, as the end. The words from long practice had come to be
leaves, trees, the corners of his house--such was the end. He had
progressed leaving the others far behind him. Alone in that air with the
words of his brain he had breathed again the pure mountain air of
joy--there night after night in his poor room. And now he must leave
her. She the--He had written the last word and getting up he understood
the fog as it billowed before the lights.
That which had been impossible for him at first had become possible.
Everything had been removed that other men had tied to the words to
secure them to themselves. Clean, clean he had taken each word and made
it new for himself so that at last it was new, free from the world for
himself--never to touch it--dreams of his babyhood--poetic sweet-heart.
No. He went in to his wife with exalted mind, his breath coming in
pleasant surges. I come to tell you that the book is finished.
I have added a new chapter to the art of writing. I feel sincerely that
all they say of me is true, that I am truly a great man and a great
poet.
What did you say, dear, I have been asleep?